


Memory 19

by elena_stidham



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Cooking, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Flashbacks, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Not Beta Read, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 03:03:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15500892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elena_stidham/pseuds/elena_stidham
Summary: Link doesn't remember why cooking feels like a comforting sort of therapy, why he prefers to take things one recipe at a time, but he also doesn't remember what home feels like.Until he does.





	Memory 19

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS FOR: Angst, fluff, language, violence and death (it’s not gruesome or gory or anything though)  
> SONGS USED TO GET IN THE MOOD: Some Breath of the Wild music covers on Spotify  
> I wanted to explore a bit into Link’s childhood and such, of course it’s a one off oneshot, but it’s rather close to how I hc it. I also wanted an excuse for Zelda to comfort Link tbh since most fics depict him helping her. Anyways, I really hope you like this fic as I spent way too long on it xD If you’d like to read more Zelda fics then you’d probably like Zelda-specific tumblr, minuetofthewild. If not, you’d probably prefer my personal, elenastidham. Either way, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy!  
> -Elena

This memory can be found in a specific kind of morning glow – the same peculiar kind of late dawn that peered through his tent without any breeze or dew – there was at first, a silence, then after a few mere seconds of stilled vivid consciousness there’s a faint accordion playing from the stable.

Link doesn’t realise when this changes, but this song isn’t from an accordion anymore.

When Link opens his eyes again he finds himself in a child’s bedroom, a faint humming from outside his creaked open window. He pushes himself up on the bed with a yawn before practically jumping off the bed, landing on his tiny feet with a thud. He has to reach on his tip toes to open doors, but still he manages to break free from the confides of the wooden house and into the wild alone.

He wanders around the sides, noticing how the humming grows louder again. He stops when he sees her – the woman with long red hair pulled behind her back, her brown apron tied around her purple skirt, almost making the white of her top blend into her overall outfit like a dress. She’s tending to the garden again.

The child steps close enough to her for her to stop humming and turn to face him, then smiles. “You’re up early,” she comments, brushing her hands off on her apron as she stands. She picks up the boy in her arms and kisses his cheek. “Are you hungry?”

Link nods, rubbing his eyes.

The woman takes him inside, her humming’s stopped now, and she helps him sit on the tall chairs in their kitchen before she pauses. She waits for just a moment, before letting herself grin. “How’s about you cook with me today?”

Link stares, only vaguely blinking.

“I know you don’t know how,” she says as she scoops him back into her arms and has him sit on the counter. “But I think it’d be smart and wise if you learned with me today. How does that sound?”

He just nods again, watching the woman reach up into the cabinet above their stove for a book. She brings the cookbook down and hands it to her child. “Look here,” she tells him, pointing to the book. “Pick a breakfast. That’s what we’ll learn today.”

He opens the book, his eyes growing wide in awe as he stares at all the possible food he can chose from. He feels something bubble inside his gut as he looks at the pictures, unable to read yet what each passage is saying.

Link stops on a page that looks appetising enough for his odd childish taste, and he points at it.

She peeks over his shoulder and chuckles. “A fried egg and rice?”

He nods once.

With that, she brings out the supplies they’d need and has the boy just hand them to her as she makes what they’re going to eat. As each ingredient cooks, she explains each process, what she’s doing and how it’s being made – knowing that her boy is smart enough to catch on, and he learns quickly.

When they finish, she brings him to their table once again, this time with their new dish that they cooked together, and she lets him have the first bite.

“What do you think of it, baby?” She asks, her gestures tender.

Link barely manages a nod as he’s already stuffing a third bite into his face. She giggles.

“Slow down,” she demands him through a light-hearted laugh, and he complies. She watches him continue to eat, a little slower, but she also notices a special kind of light in his eyes when it comes to making food that he gets to eat.

“If you’d like, we can learn something new from this book every day. It can be our thing, just you and me,” his mother ponders to him, her voice warm and almost melting the boy. “We can cook every day together, if you want.”

Link’s head darts up from his plate, suddenly nodding vigorously at her. He isn’t able to say ‘please’ with half a dozen spoonfuls of food in his mouth, but she laughs when she gets the point. She reaches over and ruffles his hair.

“Perfect then,” she smiles at him. “We’ll do a recipe a day.”

The boy’s eyes light up, his overall demeanour suddenly ecstatic at the thought of going through all those books together every day with his mother – the little bubble on the inside of his gut suddenly wanting to explode. Despite his young age, he realises what he wants to do for the rest of his life.

The door opens, and when the mother and child turn their head, they see an exhausted, yet lively man wander through the doorframe. He smiles softly at them both, gently ruffling the boy’s hair before planting a kiss on the top of his wife’s head.

“What’re you eating?” He asks, resting his forehead on the top of her head before turning to the dishes. The only way he figures out what they had is through the woman’s plate, since Link had completely devoured his all. “It smells good.”

“Your son helped make it,” She explains to him, turning her head so they can kiss briefly as she stands. “Do you want the rest of mine? I can’t finish it.”

“That sounds delicious, dear,” He kisses her cheek again so he can sit across from his son and eat some. “It tastes delicious, too.”

Link just watches her as she places the cookbook away, humming gently again as she carefully starts to clean the dishes they used and clear the mess they made. The sun beams in from the window, shining through her red hair, casting an amber glow of fire across her mane.

He lets out a one-breath chuckle from his nose before leaning across the table and gently pinching the cheeks on his son. “It’ll make you big and strong for when you’re a knight,” he says. “It’ll help you grow—”

“—I don’t wanna be a knight,” Link says finally, almost pouting. The kitchen suddenly falls silent, the words completely uncharacteristic of the years of agreeing before. The parents make eye contact for a moment, neither of which angry – but instead confused – and turning their faces back by the time he begins to speak again. “I don’t wanna fight. I wanna cook. I wanna make food like Mother does.”

Mother suddenly purses her lips together and tries to hide the fact they’re curving upwards in a smile. She fails.

His father, however, is displeased. He narrows his eyes for a moment before simply setting his fork down and folding his hands on the table. “You don’t have a choice,” he says coolly, his demeanour suddenly uneasy. “You’re going to be a knight.”

“No,” Link replies.

“ _Link_ —”

“—Dear,” Mother interjects softly, her voice quietly carrying a torch-lit flame. “Perhaps we can talk about this in a more civil manner.” She takes a deep breath and shrugs. “After all, he doesn’t _have_ to.”

“You’re right, but he _really, really should,_ ” the father emphasises. He turns his head and makes eye contact with her. It’s almost as if she knew better.

She gives him a look, eyebrow raised. “He’s just a boy.”

“Do you not see that _thing_ on his hand?” He hisses, gesturing to said boy. The boy looks down, noticing the outline. He’s known it was there, but he likes to pretend it doesn’t really exist. The room falls quiet again, and to everyone except the child, the issue runs clear. “He needs to be prepared to use it. The last thing I want for my son is for him to live that kind of life, but by goddesses I’ll be damned if I just let him fall in battle.”

Mother’s eyes are somewhere else now, somewhere distant. She looks at her son before swallowing hard and smiling reassuringly, her arms folded against her chest. She has a tendency to do this when she’s particularly worried. “Link, sweetheart,” she says now, her voice gentle and comforting. “Don’t worry. We’ll take this one recipe a day.”

Link looks back to his empty plate, suddenly aware at how much he feels the weight of the world.

Link’s eyes trail over to the back of his hand again, but it seems the moment he sees that golden outline he’s no longer at home. He quickly glances around, eyes wide and suddenly noticing that it’s ten years later, and this is the day where Hyrule died.

 _She has to go to the castle,_ he thinks. _She needs to get there safe._

It takes a moment for Link to register who _she_ is.

He stumbles at the main gates, his eyes widening and his expression faltering at the sight. Castle Town, for lack of a better term, was in complete ruins. He turns back to Zelda, who’s practically frozen in shock.

“We can’t go in this way,” he calls to her, trying to remain calm for her. There’s got to be a different way in – some area just a little bit safer. He remembers how his family lived just outside of Castle Town, and he remembers that his father knows countless ways in and out like the back of his hand, more so than the appointed knight that’s spent more time outside the castle than within, it seemed. He motions for the princess to follow, heading towards his personal safe haven in a heavy jog.

He finds them on a familiar dirt and stone path that he used to take when he’d make his way to home and back for training; noticing that already, some stones are flown off and overturned. He doesn’t realise now at this point he’s completely sprinting.

Link sees his house, he even sees his parents, but what he doesn’t expect to see is what his father is _fighting._ The guardian sets its target on his mother, and with a quick shove, she’s suddenly in the house with the deepening red ray on his father’s chest. Link begins his steps forward, but he no more makes it three feet before the princess suddenly calls his name.

He turns to her, and halfway through his turn he’s suddenly pushed into the land. His eyes dart up, quickly spinning to the side to dodge another attack from a moblin. He shoots up, quickly bringing his sword down on the monster and watching it burst in clouds of purple – but out of the corner of his eyes, he sees flames. He turns back towards his house, suddenly seeing the building on fire, a noticeable fiery beam shot directly down the centre, igniting the sides.

His body stills, already knowing that the second corpse lies inside. Link’s breath hitches in his throat, and it’s everything he can do to make it over to the other side, trying not to stare at his fallen father just beneath him. He knows the dampness on the ground just stepped in didn’t come from the rain.

He opens the door, watching it practically fall off its hinges – and among the flames, he finds his mother had died in the exact same way. The beam through their bodies would have sliced quick enough to be painless, but at the same time the last thing they would have felt was a sharp, indescribable sensation of _burn._

Zelda at this point in her life has only seen few emotions out of her appointed knight, but today marks the day with the most shock and heartbreak she’s ever seen. If she doesn’t know any better, she’d swear that Link had forgotten to breathe.

And there he stands, once again, a tiny boy amongst his failures, starting to finally cave under the weight of the world.

Zelda slowly walks up behind him, taking his hand in both of hers in a reassuring way, feeling a deep pang of guilt in her heart. “Link—” she begins, but instead he turns, wiping his eyes and grabs her wrist. His eyes follow the guardian just past the burning house, and looks in a different direction, noticing some woods that dip close to the castle nearby.

With that, his grip on her wrist tightens, and he _runs._

 

* * *

 

Link gasps when he’s finished, Zelda’s shaking on him coming to a stop as she sighs of relief and sits back. “Goddess, you weren’t even _moving_ ,” she says, her worry still prominent. “You were just there with your eyes all wide and frozen in place.”

Link stares at her for a moment, before he sighs and sits up, running his hand through his hair and shaking his head. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “I just remembered something, is all.”

“Oh really?” Zelda smiles. “What did you remember?”

He doesn’t look at her, his eyebrows furred together as he stares in a particular spot in the corner of the tent, the cool breeze wafting in from the outside and Kass’s accordion still rhymes with the rhythm of his mother’s song. “My parents,” he says softly.

Zelda’s face suddenly falters, when she, too, remembers the horrific fate of the couple on that particularly rainy night. She takes a deep breath and scoots herself closer, taking his hand both of hers. “Are you alright?”

“I think so,” he tells her, his hand gently resting in hers. There’s a kind of comfort that comes with her touch that didn’t come before the rise of the Calamity, so now he makes sure to relish in every aspect of that fact. There’s a wet glisten on his cheek now, just one, but they’re both sure that there’s probably more to come. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to think with that.”

Zelda remembers how immediately after he takes her wrist they run into some dense woods, his eyes hard and narrow with concentration desperately trying to become distraction, and she remembers slipping. She remembers how she fell, how he held her, how she just _broke._

However, this time, it was her knight’s turn to cry.

It’s not a heavy sob, but it’s enough for the princess to see how, noticeably, there’s new damage. She takes him into her arms, holding him against her chest as she runs her hand through his hair.

They stay like this, for however long he needs it to be.

While they’re on the road again, Zelda notices that Link is awfully quiet, a lot like he used to be before the Calamity. She knows that their route actually is close by the ruins of Castle Town, and she hopes that it won’t be painful for him every time they go around this way. He takes a deep breath quietly, before turning his head towards her, his voice small. “Can we stop there?” He grieves. “Just for a moment?”

She nods. “We can stay as long as you need.”

There’s practically nothing left of the house by the time he makes it back for the first time. A century’s worth of burning and decay really left its mark on the place, but even then Link knows his way around almost identically. He tells her the general rough layout of where he used to stay, what each room was and some of his fondest memories associated in each place.

He pauses a little longer when he’s standing in the ashy remains of the kitchen. “My mother and I used to be here together all the time,” he explains. “She had dozens of cookbooks, and we’d go through them, one recipe, every day, until—”

Link stops at a particular spot in the ruins, his eyes fixed on a hint of cover among the burnt ashes and singe. He leans down, pushing a plank of wood off the book, and opening it, flipping through each page. Most of them were illegible or burnt to nothing, except for one. He stares at this particular page for a long while before he just smiles softly and rips it out, stuffing it in his back pocket.

“What was that one?” Zelda asks.

He shakes his head before he shrugs, despite him knowing the answer. He turns back to her and gestures onward, now visibly a little more calm, his voice gradually returning for the rest of their travels for the night and falling back into a more nonchalant, easier kind of vibe.

When they reach the end of their night, they’re just outside Hateno Village, the both of them starving as they make their way inside the home that once belonged just to him. Zelda pours out he pouch on the table, starting to pick apart some coins she has in order to pay for dinner, but Link shakes his head, placing a hand on hers for a moment to get her to stop. “I’ll cook,” he offers.

“It’s late.”

“I’m willing to wait.”

Zelda takes a deep breath, then finally shrugs. Patience, really, wasn’t her best virtue – it’s not something she lacks, it’s just something she’s more than likely to overstep and forget. “How long is it going to take?”

“Not long.”

“Okay.”

She leaves him to his cooking, knowing that for him it’s become his own a version of therapy and comfort that nothing really else could provide. Before, she just assumed it was something time consuming and gets him occupied enough for distraction that had his full attention, but now she realises that it brought him home, and neither of them even knew it. Nothing else had done that before.

She’s upstairs when he’s finished, and she’s quick to make her way to the table when he calls for her. She sits down, smiling softly at the dish before turning towards him. “Is this your favourite?”

“If I had to pick, probably,” he says, smiling softly at his plates before looking at her. “You try it first.”

Zelda just chuckles through her nose and complies, the taste of fried egg and rice somehow give her a feeling of home on her tongue.


End file.
